


Suffer With Me

by merfemme



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-16
Updated: 2012-03-15
Packaged: 2017-11-02 00:26:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/362995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merfemme/pseuds/merfemme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Watson's alcoholism has caused her to break up her civil partnership with Clara.  As she heals and learns to grieve for the wife she's lost, she meets a certain maid, employed by Irene Adler, who will see in her the potential to love again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suffer With Me

The ache was the worst of all at night, when she at last had to convince herself that she was, in fact, tired. She would clamber into bed, drunk knees wobbling and cropped hair lank; she would shuffle her legs and clutch her pillow to her puffy face. Hours would pass as she began to sober up. She would try to tell herself that she would fall asleep sober, that she wouldn't reach for the bottle until tomorrow night. But, she would always, infallibly, start to cry and then need an enormous, sloppy gulp of wine. 

Or vodka. Or champagne. 

Harriet Watson, "Harry," was a sophisticated drunk. This was what she insisted when, for example, John called to wish her yet another happy birthday and heard her slurring on the other end of the phone; or, for another example, she couldn't fall asleep because she yearned for her wife's warmth against her cold, bare skin. At the very least, she took her alcohol with style. It was an advantage that hadn't yet gone to the wayside, where an innumerable selection of shit had been heaped. 

Naturally, Harry Watson, the very sophisticated drunk, only managed to cock up the best of things. She still had a flat with walls that peeled more paint every time she showered. She also still had a spaniel, Lady, whose epilepsy took what little income was left after drink. Harry loved Lady after a fashion, for she was yet another broken bitch held down with recourse to nothing. But, she wasn't Clara. 

No woman was. Harry slept alone, unsexed and devastated as she could be, because no woman would ever be better than her wife. There was no woman alive whose wit was as quick, whose eyes as vivid, whose body as welcome as Clara's. And, so stupidly and helplessly, Harriet Watson had forcibly abandoned her. 

Every morning when she woke up, head spinning and tongue dry, Harry would remember how she'd evicted Clara after almost two years of marriage. It had been just one drink, just a single tumbler of raspberry vodka and lime soda, but Clara--sweet, sweet Clara--had needed to pull it from her hand. Harry had felt her heart lurch forward in her chest, following the drink in her darling's hand. She smacked Clara hard on her face without even thinking. She was too drunk by then, and had been too drunk for years, to understand. Clara yelped; her brown eyes widened in complete shock. Soft, gentle Clara began sobbing as Harry's strafe attack began. 

"Get out," she snarled. "Get out of my fucking house, Clara." Her unfocused eyes were red and terrifying. As Clara backed into a retreat, nearing the door of their flat and dropping her plastic sacks of groceries from Waitrose, Harry gestured haphazardly with a shaking hand. Clara flinched since she couldn’t tell whether another, unheard-of slap was coming.

"H-Harriet, please...” She was breathing in gasps, and her thick, chestnut hair was matting from the snot that was already dripping from her nose. Though backing away, she implored Harry with all the courage a timid, posh thing could summon. “Harry, this isn’t you. If you just stopped drinking, you’d--”

“I would what, Clara? What would I do?” Harriet Watson stumbled forward into her wife for another smack across the face, this time catching her knuckles on the bridge of Clara’s nose; a sharp crack sounded. Harry continued ranting, however. “This is me, Clara. I am your wife, and don’t you fucking dare tell me that this isn’t who I am. Get the fuck out of my house, okay? I don’t want to hear your sanctimonious rubbish!”

Clara’s nose was bruising already, a bloody and purple stain blooming between her eyes. She looked down, taking in the sack of food at her feet and the scars on Harriet’s feet--Harry Watson had never been a graceful drunk--in the manner of a dog who, having torn apart her master’s house, dissolves into shame once the deed is revealed. Clara Watson was no guilty bitch, nor was she brave enough to argue. Harry had never hit her before, and the shock of the act was enough to silence her.

“Clara Motcombe, I told you to leave,” Harry reminded her, taking the drink back with a swipe of her hand.

“Watson. Clara Watson,” she murmured, and then she marched down the stairs and drove away.

 

The floor of Harry Watson’s flat was covered in porcelain shards, ripped paper, and pens. Visible on some of the ripped bits of paper, which were soaked brown from spilled tea, were words such as hate, pretentious bitch, and Clara Motcombe. The pens had made contact with the wall tip-first so that the wall was dotted with black spots of ink. Bedclothes were in odd places, having been dragged wherever intoxicated need suited their mistress. Harry had, it would have been apparent had anyone tried to check on her, spent the week after the incident in an attempt to destroy whatever her hands could reach.

Without shaking, naturally. She stilled them just long enough to write the first diatribe against her wife, which she shredded and launched cups of tea at. After that, it was just easier to throw cups and saucers as it suited her, bone china from some high-end shop breaking into fractured scenes of flowers and peasants, than it was to keep herself from shaking enough to write out her hate.

“That bint,” she murmured under her breath when she finally woke up sober on the eighth day after Clara had returned to the Motcombe residence in Kensington. Her breath stank of McEwan’s and vodka, all fruity taste lost under the thick coating of liquor that was probably suffocating the inside of her. 

She stumbled to the washroom, vomited, and drew a bath. Her clothes were stiff with dirt and there were red streaks in her skin where her dressing gown had pressed into her skin. Harry’s hands tensed at the gown’s seam, pulling a hole in it before it was tossed on the floor.

The bathwater was far too hot, but Harry slid into it anyway, relishing the way it nearly burned her skin. That bitch. Her head was pounding with pain from the liquor she’d drunk after Clara left, and her throat closed sickeningly as she ducked under the water. The moment of nausea passed. It was more than she could manage to clean herself, however, and she settled in the bath with a hand cupping one small breast.

She was better off without Clara, surely. The pretty thing hadn’t known when to leave well enough alone, ever. Life with a wife like Clara Watson, née Motcombe, had always been a string of Harriet, pleases and Not another drink, Harrys, a chorus of Come see Mummy, you know she loves yous and Why are you so nervouses. It was as if the impulse to be kind had been amplified to the extreme, such that it overcame shyness and the distance of wealth. Of course, after a sweet word to either her wife or a total stranger, Clara had always blushed. Harry had found it terribly lovely, if only because it had not, at first, been following Clara’s whining.

Harry pinched her nipple hard, trying to feel a strong enough pain to push away the thoughts of Clara. It worked as well as it ever had, and it never had. Even drinking couldn’t make her forget Clara Watson, so she extended a hand over the side of the tub in search of her mobile. Conveniently in her dressing gown’s pocket, for once, it was a slim and expensive phone with an engraving on the back: Harry Watson, Love, Clara xxx Harry rubbed her thumb over the letters before dialing John’s number. They could’ve been branding irons, those letters, for they seemed to burn her skin as the dial tone sounded. It was so loud in her ear, with no noise in a week except her own rage and the swirl of alcohol in bottles.

John answered, his voice weary and efficient. “John Watson speaking.” Harry could hear him sigh on the other end of the line.

“John, it’s Harry.” She fought to keep an angry lump from her throat. She would not cry to her older brother about her wife, seeing as he had only just returned from Afghanistan. It would be stupid, foolish and young, especially since she was the reason for Clara’s departure.

John was already sick of hearing from her; she knew that as soon as he answered. “What is it, Harriet? Can’t Clara help you this time?”

It was always the drinking that made her call, and they both knew it. Harry never called with a steady voice or a sober mind; she hadn’t been sober since turning seventeen, and after she had left home, the alcoholism was even more apparent. In their minds, separated as they had been since Harry moved away and John became a soldier, they were comrades. As soon as Harriet got it into her head to call him, though, it was obvious that his impatience with her had to stay. She would never call him just to hear his voice, and he would never be able to listen to hers without a drunken quaver in it.

“John, I-I’ve done something stupid.”

“Worse than the last time, Harriet?”

“It’s Harry, John, and yeah, worse than the last time.” Her eyes were filling with shameful tears.

“What, then? I really haven’t got the time.” He resented her for everything she’d done to him, everything beyond what little sisters were supposed to do.

“I m-made her leave, John. C-Clara...” And she started to cry.


End file.
